If one were to watch An Officer and a Gentlemen, Top Gun, or the numerous other military underdog movies out there, make a list of everything that happened in those movies, and then go see The Guardian, it is almost a sure bet you would be checking off the same things all over again. As I mentioned in my review of Gridiron Gang just a few weeks ago, I don't mind overly cliched films as long as they are done well. And while The Guardian is definitely done well, thanks to some strong direction by Andrew Davis (Holes, The Fugitive), it comes across as robotic and stiff where it really counts in the characters and their relationships. The movie knows all the right notes to hit, but it doesn't know how to hit them in such a way to make us care. With a dragged out running time of nearly two and a half hours, the film starts to wear out its welcome about a half hour early.

Veteran Coast Guard Chief Ben Randall (Kevin Costner) has been saving lives and swimming through dangerous waters for years, but his career seems to be on the downward spiral when one of his rescue missions goes wrong and winds up costing the lives of the rest of the crew. With the memory of the failed mission haunting his dreams, and his long-time wife Helen (Sela Ward) leaving him, Ben feels as though he is washed up. His understanding Captain (Clancy Brown) thinks Ben just needs some time out of the field of action, and assigns him to be a teacher for some new recruits at the training center. Of the young students that Ben is assigned, one of them sticks out, a flashy and cocky young man named Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher). Jake was a champion swimmer in high school, and was given scholarships to hundreds of highly regarded schools, but gave them up to join the Coast Guard for reasons that only he seems to know. The film follows the relationship of Ben and Jake as they start as rivals, learn to bond with each other, become partners, and learn to rely on each other in actual rescue situations as well as battling their own inner demons.

Given some of Andrew Davis' past credits, it's certainly no surprise that The Guardian is well done all around. The film looks good, the highlights being the water rescue scenes, which are appropriately intense and brutal. The cast is nothing special particularly, but no one offends, and everyone seems to give at least a decent performance. Yes, even Ashton Kutcher, who I'm still not fully convinced of his merits as a dramatic actor. Then again, I don't think much of him as a comedic actor either. Where The Guardian falters is not in its style, but rather what lies underneath. The screenplay by Ron L. Brinkerhoff is so depressingly run of the mill that just about anyone who has watched a movie of its kind before should be able to figure out what's going to happen almost instantly. We get a variety of training montages, we get the required bar fight scene, we get the girl who reluctantly falls in love with the cocky young cadet, we get the teacher and the student who hate each other at first, but soon realize that they're really not that different at heart...All of this we've seen before, and quite frankly we've seen done much better. It certainly doesn't help that the movie almost seems to beg us to recall the other films it uses for inspiration. When Kevin Costner's character is putting Ashton Kutcher's character through a variety of brutal and humiliating tests, and screams at him, "Why don't you just quit?", I literally expected Kutcher to scream "Because I have nowhere else to go!" like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentlemen. The Guardian never finds its own unique voice, and is content to just trot out one cliche after another.

As I mentioned earlier, a cliched story can be forgiven if the characters are likeable. Unfortunately for us, the characters who populate this story are just as cookie cutter and mundane as the storytelling. Characters come and go as they please, often without any explanation. We're told that very few of the students who attend the Coast Guard Training Center graduate, and the movie tries to display this by showing Ben's class getting smaller and smaller with each scene. Unfortunately, we never get to know anything about any of the students aside from Jake and one of his friends who is on his third attempt to pass the training course after failing it previous years, so we don't feel anything when they show the class getting smaller, nor do we feel anything when the proud graduates are standing up there on the stage. We also never really get a truly successful transition in Ben and Jake's relationship that turns them from almost enemies to trusted partners. There is a scene where the two open up to each other about Jake's past, and why he joined the Coast Guard, but it certainly doesn't explain why Costner's character would not only keep Kutcher in his class, but also why they would drive to a local bar and get in a fight together. Maybe it's a strange form of male bonding. Whatever the case, I never bought their relationship for a second, nor did I care if any of the students up there on the screen made it to Graduation Day.

For a movie that has nothing new to say, it certainly takes up a lot of time to say it. The 135 minutes that make up The Guardian are mostly filled with training montages (some of which seem to suddenly stop instead of actually ending), and scenes of Costner and Kutcher getting on each other's nerves, then bonding. There are a number of scenes in this movie that could have been edited out without any sacrifice to the story or the movie itself. It also doesn't help that this film suffers from "false ending syndrome". You know, the kind of movie that fools you into thinking it's over, you start to reach for your things, only to have a new scene pop up on the screen, and you scramble to put your stuff back down? This movie has not one, but two false endings. The image fades out, you wait for the credits, and they just don't come. It's almost like the movie is playing a prank on you. It's a shame the movie doesn't know when to quit, because the longer it goes, the more ludicrous it becomes. By the time it was actually over, I started to wonder why we needed those past 20 minutes, when what happened before it would have sufficed as a passable conclusion.

Is The Guardian a total failure? Not particularly. There are some strong action sequences, and the performances don't disappoint. They're just surrounded by long patches where nothing really important happens, but the movie keeps on insisting that we watch it. Before long, it starts to resemble less a movie and more a promotional film for the U.S. Coast Guard. I'm sure this film will be a major crowd pleaser judging by the reaction of the audience I saw the film with. It just never moved me emotionally in the way it obviously so desperately wanted to. Maybe The Guardian tries too hard. Quite frankly, I wish it had tried just a bit harder at making us care about the characters, instead of concentrating on being such a cliched and manipulative patriotic film.

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